The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A document may be described as a set of information designed and presented as an individual entity. A publication is one example of a document. It may contain logical subunits such as parts, sections, or chapters; but it is typically created, updated, and presented as a single unit. An electronic document is an electronic representation of a paper document encoded in some machine processable form.
Conventionally, if a document needs to be discussed, one option is to use e-mail-based or on-line collaboration, which allows participants of a discussion to add comments into the document and to share them with the other participants. Alternatively, participants can discuss the document in person, without the use of any computer system. Another option is to set up an on-line meeting or a conference, or a telephone or video conference. The participants can then discuss the document, and exchange their thoughts. The conventional methods, however, may be cumbersome, overly complicated, and resource-intensive, especially if only a brief discussion of the document is desired. Even if an on-line meeting is set up, the information exchanged among participants in the course of the on-line meeting may not be linked to or associated with the document. Therefore, there may be no connection between the document itself and the content of the discussion pertaining to the document. Whenever there is a need to associate the content of the discussion pertaining to the document with the document, a user may need to manually modify the document in order to include the discussion, and then to circulate the modified document to all the participants.
E-mail and on-line collaboration may include one participant adding comments to the document and then making the document with comments available to other participants. However, the communications provided by these methods is not occurring in real-time (e.g., in some existing systems that provide on-line collaboration, the users need to manually synchronize their comments with the server).